Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred from Moses to Salman Rushdie. - book reviews

National Review, Nov 29, 1993 by Matthew Berke

THE bulk of this bulky volume is devoted to cataloguing and condemning religious intolerance and persecution throughout history-with overwhelming emphasis on the history of Western Christendom, and especially the Anglo-American world. Leonard Levy, a distinguished scholar of the American Constitution and a First Amendment specialist, also celebrates civilization's "inchmeal" progress toward complete freedom of expression "in the field of religious belief and experience," an achievement that is essential to "intellectual liberty in general." On the whole, Blasphemy exhibits a fairness and a breadth of sympathies that transcend the parochialism of modern liberalism; in key respects, however, it reveals liberalism's intellectual limits in dealing with religion.

Blasphemy, as it was understood in ancient Israel, was a relatively narrow and technical term: it referred to the reviling of God or the divine name or the sacred Scripture. But with the rise of Christianity, Levy explains, this definition was enlarged, so that during the Middle Ages the Roman Catholic Church sometimes equated blasphemy with the more serious crime of heresy, i.e., the propagation of false doctrine and the denial of orthodox truth; more often, it simply tossed in blasphemy charges when prosecuting various heretics: Donatists, Cathars, Arians, Docetists, etc. After the Reformation, Protestant authorities tended to punish dissenters and rival sects for blasphemy in its original, narrow sense, though here too blasphemy often got mixed up with the related offenses of heresy, obscenity, sedition, and disturbing the peace.

Many of these stories of religious persecution will be familiar to students of history, but they are for the most part retold interestingly, with due attention to such seminal dissenters as Michael Servetus, Giordano Bruno, John Wycliffe, George Fox, Roger Williams, Thomas Paine, and Richard Carlile, to name just a few. The narrative proceeds through the centuries right up to the most recent attempts in the U.S. and Britain to punish or suppress blasphemous speech, books, films, and advertisements. A variety of colorful sectarian movements also make appearances. (There is a long chapter, for instance, on the Ranters, an anarchistic, antinomian, anti-Trinitarian movement of seventeenth-century England; deliberately lewd, vulgar, lazy, gluttonous, and--by almost any standard-utrageously blasphemous in public, they were suppressed in 1650.) Intriguing themes emerge almost inadvertently: one is struck, for instance, by the frequency with which unitarianism rather than atheism has been at the heart of religious dissent in Christendom. Rebellion against the Incarnation and the Trinity as a permanent tendency is so large a theme in these pages that it could, with some additional research, be spun off into a separate book.

Predictably, orthodox Christianity comes in for harsh judgment. Readers unfamiliar with the history of religious thought might come away with the impression that men like Augustine and Aquinas and Calvin really didn't say much of importance, being too busy inventing rationales for the persecution of heretics. The impulse of religious authorities to protect (from eternal damnation), rather than simply to persecute, is never treated sympathetically, nor are legitimate concerns about political unity and public morality. Yet this is not a simplistic anti-religious tract. Mr. Levy clearly appreciates the moral and spiritual issues that religion addresses, and he does not try to explain all of the trials, whippings, incarcerations, burnings at the stake, hangings, and mutilations as the inevitable product of supernatural belief and hope; nor does he depict all dissenters as noble or likable (some were kooky, others fanatical, and many were more bigoted than their inquisitors).

More significant than partisan bias is the disjointed and episodic character of the narrative as it lumbers from one instance of repression to the next, often without a clear dramatic thread. Perhaps if Mr. Levy had chosen to accentuate the positive-that is, to make the progress of religious liberty the main story line--it might have given the narrative greater continuity and purpose. Adam Smith famously observed that poverty needs no explanation because it is the normal condition of life; it is the generation of wealth that needs to be explained. Analogously, it could be argued that one should study history expecting repression for the sake of religious or political unity; the historical innovation in need of fuller explanation is the process by which a repressive social harmony is superseded by one that incorporates diversity within unity. At times Mr. Levy seems to recognize that Christianity has certain resources for toleration. But there is no serious historical analysis of how religion and secular developments, taken together, helped make toleration both possible and, in the end, almost universally desired in the West (even among religious conservatives).